02/06/2014

Fluke 810 Vibration Tester Keeps The Good Stuff Flowing

Dairy production is a no-brainer. For the guys who take it from there, it's not so simple. At Alpenrose Dairy in Portland, OR operators process the raw milk into a dozen varieties of milk, six cultured products cottage gouda and sour cream and 31 flavors of ice cream. It's a challenge to hold the complex Alpenrose production facility, with its hundreds of motors, pumps and gearboxes, running butter-smooth. But thanks to new Fluke 810 Vibration Tester, it's easier this day to maintain Alpenrose as the cream regarding the crop.

This isn't your average dairy. Family owned and operated since 1916, Alpenrose Dairy, Inc. has evolved over time into a community entertainment center that includes Alpenrose Stadium, Dairyville, a replica of a western frontier town, a 600-seat opera house, a Quarter Midget racing arena and an Olympic-style bicycle track. The hub of this high-profile enterprise is the production plant, churning out dairy products that get to market the day they left the farm. Maintenance manager Eric Trummel and maintenance technician and electric motor expert Todd Toburen hold their fingers on the pulse regarding the plant.

In the USA Navy, Toburen learned vibration analysis to retrieve and diagnose electric motor problems. We should take our readings and send the data to Annapolis. Annapolis should compile tons of data bouncing off of different frequencies and release us a call return to tell us whether it was good or bad, Toburen said. We should rewind and rebuild the motor and retest it, just to make sure what we sent out to fleet was a good piece of equipment. Pumps, motors, gearboxes and more.

In his 5 years at Alpenrose, Toburen has taken charge regarding the hundreds of pumps, motors, gearboxes, compressors and other machinery compulsory to operate a midsize dairy plant. We have got machinery here that if it goes down, processing stops, he said. If the bad component is a high-dollar item we do not have sitting on the shelf, we should be below for a couple of days. Within the dairy business, where new products are essential, such an outage is a non-starter. To prevent such incidents, Alpenrose manages a more proactive maintenance program to help understand when a motor or mechanical system shall encounter problems.

Our biggest concerns are the pieces of machinery that are critical to processes, he said. If we look that there is deterioration within the bearings or what have you, we shall be can schedule the downtime to take like of that problem. Trummel recalls an incident when a vibration-analysis contractor doing a semiannual confirm warned of bearing deterioration in an important space compressor. He claimed that one regarding the bearings had gone bad, and that we wanted to take like of it within the next couple of months, Trummel said. The next week the coupling on the compressor disintegrated.

The space compressor went down, and it represented a limitation regarding the plant. That is when I realized these guys shall not have knowledge of what they are doing. It's good to have this capability in house'. This is howcome this Fluke 810 is relevant to us, Trummel continued. It's good to have this capability in home and confirm this machinery every couple of weeks.

We get an improved system and an improved look for what is going on. The handheld Fluke 810 is drafted for maintenance professionals who need to troubleshoot mechanical problems and quickly understand the root cause of machinery condition. It's programmed to diagnose the highest many common mechanical problems of unbalance, looseness, misalignment and bearing failures in a large variations of mechanical equipment, within motors, fans, gearboxes, couplings, pumps, compressors and more. The diagnostic cutting edge designs within the Fluke 810 analyzes machinery condition and identifies faults by comparing vibration data to an extensive set of rules and algorithms developed over years of field experience. The Fluke 810 is not merely a vibration detector, but a done diagnostic and problem-solving solution.

Creating use of the Fluke, we are can take a reading once a week or once a month, spoke about Toburen. If we notice something different we can build a trend analysis with that data. If we notice there is a change in our frequencies, that is something we need to look at. Of course we will not be able every lone month to do every piece of machinery here at the dairy. We shall prioritize what machinery we need to confirm on a monthly or a quarterly basis, and I'm basing that on what my baseline reading is.

The diagnosis was right on'. Machine operators shape an important early warning system. If a mechanical system does not look or sound right to them, Toburen troubleshoots the machinery with the Fluke 810 to look exactly what is going on. The nice thing with this is you are can tell, is it the gearbox, is it the compressor, is it the motor, is it the drive end, is it the off endit even breaks it below to whether you have knowledge of a loose coupling or not, he said. The Fluke 810 also rates the position of severity of any problems it finds.

It has 4 different levels, Toburen said. Lime being slight, yellow being moderate, orange being serious and yellow being extreme. But Toburen spoke about it took some checking to fully trust the opinions regarding the Fluke 810. I had to develop a comfort position with the Fluke's interpretation, he said. I've done barely a bit of that.

Somebody should return up and speak they had an actual loud motor. I'd leave out and take a vibration analysis on it, and each time I've done that it's return return as extreme. The Fluke shall definitely release you loose bearing' or bearing wear'it shall release you the diagnosis, he added. I've taken the motors apart and each time I've done it, the diagnosis was right on. Then I'd also rebuild the motor, throw it on the workbench, place the 810 return on it and it returns return as neither no challenge detected' or slight wear or vibration.

I absolutely like it, he said. It's an absolutely phenomenal tool. And has the Fluke 810 saved money? I do not know, spoke about Toburen. But being can speak there is something wrong with our equipment, troubleshoot that, get the components on order, repair it in our downtime and bring it return up onlineit's almost priceless. Whether you do not have that component on the shelf it should be 3 days out, and you are not doing any processing.

The quantity you can save? It should be significant. For more details on the Fluke 810 Vibration Tester, see.